A reader has tipped me to the news that Scribd has quietly removed digital comics from its subscription reading service. Ten thousand comics had been added in February 2015 when Scribd was still in the upward swing, but now that Scribd is in decline the comic books have vanished in a cost-cutting measure.

Scribd had not officially announced the change, but numerous people have complained about their departure on Twitter, and digital comics are no longer mentioned on the Scribd website.

Scribd confirmed the news in a statement:

We launched comics in 2015, and while we were excited to bring new content to our readers, few actively took advantage of them. We will be focusing our efforts on enhancing the experience surrounding our other great content types including books, audiobooks, magazines, and documents.

We alerted comic readers of the news via email in early December. We understand that this news is disappointing to comic readers. This was a difficult decision, and we hope that they’ll explore the rest of what Scribd has to offer in the coming months.

It’s interesting that Scribd says that they informed subscribers, because that is not the impression I get from the complaints on Twitter. Many were surprised when they noticed, and based on the timestamps the comics were apparently pulled on or before 1 December. Or at least that’s when the first complaint was tweeted:

No comics? Bye! @Scribd pic.twitter.com/nmFy4xTJ1U

— Aric (@flametrooper420) December 1, 2016

Yes, the comics were gone for a month before the press noticed.

That says something about how Scribd subscriber regularly used the comics, don’t you think? (It also points to a low userbase in general, but that is a stretch.)

Along with Oyster, Scribd was one of two subscription ebook services to launch in late 2013. Kindle Unlimited was late to the party in July 2014, but at this point it looks like KU is going to be the only survivor.

Oyster was bought out by Google and shut down in early 2016.

Scribd had launched an unlimited reading service in late 2013 only to drastically scale it back. They first culled romance titles (including Harlequin) in mid 2015, then dialed down its audiobooks offering several months later, and finally abandoned the unlimited access offer in early 2016 in favor of a credit system.

And now Scribd has dropped comics as well.

Someone stick a fork in Scribd, because they’re done, and they’re leaving Kindle Unlimited as the dominant player in this market.

While there are still small players like 24Symbols, Riidr, Bookmate, and Safari Books Online, they are dwarfed by Kindle Unlimited The latter service paid publishers and authors $182.5 million plus bonuses in the 12 months ending November 2016 (the December 2016 payments have not been announced).

To put that figure in perspective, B&N’s total Nook revenues for hardware and content sales for the 2016 fiscal year were $192 million. A far smaller percentage was paid to authors and publishers, of course.

Kindle Unlimited has survived to become one of the major ebook services. Its success can be attributed to having a corporate parent which is willing to lose money to win, and to the KU business model.

Oyster and Scribd charged readers a flat monthly fee and paid its suppliers (authors and publishers) a percentage of the retail price of a book when the reader crossed an arbitrary threshold (in some cases, 10%).

As a result their costs were only limited by the voraciousness of their subscribers, while their income was relatively fixed. If a reader consistently read three or more books a month, Oyster and Scribd lost money.

Kindle Unlimited, on the other hand, pays its suppliers from a limited monthly funding pool. The royalties are calculated based on how many pages were read in a given month, with each author getting paid when their books are read.

Kindle Unlimited has not proved popular with major publishers, however. In part that is due to the uncertain payments, but also because Amazon requires that ebooks in Kindle Unlimited be exclusive to KU and the Kindle Store.

With few exceptions, the majority of the ebooks in Kindle Unlimited are not available elsewhere. That has not limited its success, however. If anything, exclusivity has harmed Amazon’s competition far more than Amazon.

Thanks, Eric, for the tip!

image by mikecogh

Early this morning Deutsche Telecom and Kobo confirmed my scoop from last night: Kobo is taking over for DT as the technology partner for the Tolino ebook platform – but there is still more to the story.

The contracts have been signed, the handover is expected to happen by the end of this month, and they are promising that nothing will change as far as customers are concerned.

The Tolino brand will be staying around, and:

For both tolino and Kobo customers, the change of partner does not alter anything. They will still be customers of their tolino bookstore and be able to use the same services as before. The established tolino brand remains one of the leading eReading brands for the German-speaking region. And the customers will benefit from the usual free access to the hotspots, the tolino app and tolino cloud.

It is business-as-usual for retail booksellers of both the tolino and Rakuten Kobo ecosystems.

While that answers our questions about what is going to happen now, it doesn’t exactly say what will happen next. What about the next Tolino ereader – will it be replaced by Kobo hardware? Or what about the next versions of the Tolino apps?

We’re already seeing some Kobo-OverDrive integration following Rakuten buying OverDrive in 2015, so it’s reasonable to wonder whether Kobo and Tolino might also integrate, or possibly merge.

I followed up with Kobo, and here’s what they told me.

O O O

• What exactly does this mean for the future of Tolino?

For customers of both Kobo and Tolino, this transition will be seamless. Tolino is a well-known and loved brand name that booklovers trust and will remain in place. Rakuten Kobo has acquired the back-end assets that power the whitelabel service.

• Will the next Tolino ereader be a Kobo device?

Tolino devices will continue to be sold by alliance retailers under the Tolino brand. We will work together to ensure the very best reading experience for booklovers.

• Will the Tolino apps be replaced with Kobo apps?

The Tolino app will remain.

• Are the Tolino and Kobo platforms going to be integrated, or run independently?

Tolino is a major player in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, and will be the exclusive eBook brand for our partnership in these territories. Kobo will continue to maintain its platform and devices for legacy customers.

O O O

Aside from the fact that Kobo is effectively deprecating its own platform in central Europe in favor of Tolino, there isn’t much here which wasn’t announced in the press release.

It’s the same disappointing news that Kobo won’t be reducing costs by combining the duplicate hardware and app development.

Yes, I know this would upset some customers but in terms of operating efficiency, the duplicate programs are simply a waste. There’s no need to have two teams doing the same work.

And that is why I expect that Kobo will change their minds and merge as many parts of Kobo and Tolino as possible. (Kobo’s CEO is a turnaround specialist whose mandate is to reduce costs, after all.)

Mark my words: the next Tolino device will come from Kobo’s hardware partner, Netronix. This may dismay current Tolino owners, but if the new hardware is as good as the Kobo Aura H2O then the tradeoff will be worth it.

image by naiaraback1

In 2015 the Japanese ecommerce Rakuten secured a strong position in the library ebook market by buying OverDrive. Now they’re making a similar play in Germany, although it is not entirely clear what is going on.

Deutsche Telekom has quietly filed paperwork with the Bundeskartellamt, the German Federal Cartel Office, to sell its stake in the Tolino ebook platform.  (The paperwork went in on the 22nd, and the public notice published on the 30th – during Germany’s Christmas break, when they hoped no one would notice.) The buyer is listed as Rakuten in Japan, and not its subsidiary Rakuten Kobo, which is based in Canada (a curious detail, that).

Along with Amazon, Tolino is one of the two major players in the German ebook market (there’s no current info on which is in first place). Tolino is supported by several major German media retailers and the bookseller Thalia, as well as Deutsche Telekom and booksellers in the Netherlands and Italy.

Tolino provides the apps and ebookstore platform which the partner retailers rebrand and use to sell ebooks to their customers. Tolino also provides the branded Tolino ereaders, including the Vision 4HD, which launched in November 2016.

We don’t know the terms of the deal, and in fact we still don’t know exactly what Rakuten is buying from Deutsche Telecom. Rene d’Entremont, Kobo’s Director of Public Relations, has confirmed the news but has not revealed any additional details.

Rakuten Kobo has entered into an agreement with Deutsche Telekom for the purchase of assets related to eBook technology, and will share details as they become available.

I am still waiting to hear back from other sources, but what I can tell you right now is that Rakuten is not buying Tolino outright.

The thing is, Deutsche Telecom doesn’t own Tolino. The last I had heard Tolino was still owned by the retailers who founded the ebook consortium back in March 2013.

According to Andrew Rhomberg, founder of ebook startup JellyBooks, the most likely possibility is that Kobo is taking over the Deutsche Telecom operation that was/is service provider to Tolino. If this is correct then Kobo won’t be acquiring Tolino so much as the platform backbone or infrastructure.

Kobo would own the software powering the Tolino apps and website, but not Tolino itself, Andrew  explained to me. This could lead to a merging of the Kobo and Tolino platforms while still maintaining distinct brands.

On the other hand, it is also possible that Rakuten could keep Tolino as a separate company in the same way that Kobo, Overdrive, and Aquafadas continue to function independently.

But of course that is still pure speculation; we will have to wait for an official announcement before we know what happens next.

Stay tuned.

Bundeskartellamt via lesen.net

It has been nineteen months since Google closed its book publisher portal in Google Play Books, and the larger blogosphere is just beginning to realize that it may never reopen.

A couple days ago 9to5Google pondered the same question I last asked in April: Will Google ever reopen the portal?

Google “temporarily” stopped allowing new publishers to sign up for its Google Play Books Partner Center more than a year ago, largely due to rampant piracy on the service. Now, a year and a half later (it was originally shuttered in May of 2015), the Partner Center still hasn’t opened back up…

 

…This was the initial statement that Google provided when Google stopped offering new signups, all the way back in May 2015:

We’ve temporarily closed new publisher sign ups in the Play Books Partner Center, so we can improve our content management capabilities and our user experience. We’re working to reopen this to new publishers soon. Thanks for your patience.

A support article entitled “How to sell a book on Google Play: a checklist” lists the following notice:

New publisher sign-ups in the Google Play Books Partner Center are temporarily closed.

Now, over at the Google Product Forums, there are still people posting about this asking if it will ever open back up. Even as recently as earlier this month, people interested in selling their books on Google Play Books have shared their conversations with support reps, revealing that exactly zero progress has been made.

to be clear, the portal is still open for those who already have an account there; Google just isn’t letting anyone new sign up.

Google shut down the registration feature on that portal on 25 May 2015. That was 19 months and 5 days ago, so at this point it is safe to say that Google is never going to reopen that portal.

At the very least, they are not saying anything about it. I have followed up on this story several times, and Google’s PR reps generally disappeared whenever I asked about their next step.

In fact, one rep gnawed his arm off at the wrist when I pressed him on the question (I still have his hand in my freezer).

So no, that portal is never opening again. While it might be useful to authors and publishers, from Google’s perspective it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Google doesn’t sell a lot of ebooks, and it doesn’t want to be bothered with cleaning up after pirates. The easiest and most effective way to fix the rampant piracy problem was to simply lock out the pirates by shuttering the portal, and then leaving it closed.

This is an inconvenience for authors and publishers, but not a huge one. They can reach Google Play books through distributors like Streetlib and Draft2Digital..

image by GuillermoJM

2016 has already brutally winnowed book industry blogs, and now it has claimed an ebook retailer.

All Romance eBooks has posted a notice on its site with the news that it is shutting down.

It is with a great sadness that we announce the closing of All Romance eBooks, LLC. For the first year since opening in 2006, we will be posting a loss. Despite efforts to maintain and grow our market share, sales and profits have declined. The financial forecast for 2017 isn’t hopeful. We’ve accepted that there is not a viable path forward.

All Romance has always been a labor of love. Over the years we’ve developed wonderful relationships with the vendors we’ve worked with, the publishers whose content it’s been our pleasure to sell, the authors who supported us, and the customers who it’s been our honor to serve. On midnight, December 31 our sites will go dark. Between now and then, we encourage consumers finalize any transactions, download purchases, and back up libraries.

If you directly publish content for sale through our platform or All Romance has acted as your publisher via our Publishing in Partnership program, you should be in receipt of an email from us with additional information. If not, please contact us at [email protected].

Like BooksonBoard, which abruptly shut down in 2013, All Romance eBooks has collapsed under a ton of debt.

There are several reports over at The Passive Voice (where I first learned of the closure) that ARE is offering authors and publishers ten cents on the dollar for their overdue royalty payments.

For example:

And unfortunately for me, they owe me money.

They’re asking for a settlement of .10 on the dollar for money owed. I’m not taking it, because of the amount of money they owe me. I’m also concerned that the settlement could count as preferential payments that’ll be at risk of being clawed back if they do end up in bankruptcy.

Edit: And there are reports on KBoards that ARE is giving customers only four days to download their books before the servers are turned off. That might be a little difficult given that the site has slashdotted itself and is no longer accessible.

Edit: The Romance Writers of America (RWA) has commented on the closure, saying that the "RWA finds it unconscionable for the owner of ARe to withhold information so long and to continue selling books through the end of the month when the company cannot pay commissions. RWA contacted ARe but has not yet received a response."

Edit: And it gets worse. ARE was pre-selling adverts for 2017 only days before announcing the shutdown.  They were asking for thousands of dollars for a single ad. Hopefully ARE’s victims will be able to use their credit cards to get the money back.

Edit: Authors published by ARE won’t be so lucky. They’re getting bupkis for their unpaid royalties. They’ve been offered rights reversion on condition that they consider this "a negotiated settlement of your account to be paid in full".

This is a mess all around.

image by cowbite

Barnes & Noble has issued a statement on yesterday’s story about the malware infesting the new $50 Nook Android tablet.

They say that the ADUPS malware has already been neutered, and that a future firmware update would entirely remove it from the tablet.

“NOOK Tablet 7” went on sale on November 26. By that time, the device automatically updated to a newer version of ADUPS (5.5), which has been certified as complying with Google’s security requirements, when first connected to Wi-Fi. ADUPS has confirmed to Barnes & Noble that it never collected any personally identifiable information or location data from NOOK Tablet 7” devices, nor will it do so in the future.

Finally, we are working on a software update to remove ADUPS completely from the NOOK Tablet 7”. That update will be made available to download within the next few weeks, but in the meantime customers can rest assured that the device is safe to use.” –  Fred Argir, Chief Digital Officer

I am still waiting for users to confirm that their tablets have been updated as B&N mentioned in their statement.

There is at least one user report which contradicts that claim, so I would suggest that you take it with a grain of salt.

Barnes & Noble’s ongoing efforts to outsource as much of its Nook platform as possible has just come back to haunt it.

Linux Journal reports that the new Nook 7 Android tablet which launched last month comes with free malware and spyware installed:

The latest tablet from Barnes & Noble, the newly-released $49 BNTV450, has been found to include ADUPS. In the aftermath of the BLU data theft, ADUPS hostile data collection and control over Android may (or may not) be temporarily quelled, but harmful capability remains with the ADUPS agent. Devices running ADUPS should be considered under malicious control, and they should not be used with sensitive data of any kind.

This is the same malware which was discovered in Blu brand and other cheap smartphones last month, and it is a nasty customer.

It’s a piece of spyware which sends all sorts of data back to ADUPS servers in China. Just consider it a data colostomy:

These devices actively transmitted user and device information including the full-body of text messages, contact lists, call history with full telephone numbers, unique device identifiers including the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI). The firmware could target specific users and text messages matching remotely defined keywords. The firmware also collected and transmitted information about the use of applications installed on the monitored device, bypassed the Android permission model, executed remote commands with escalated (system) privileges, and was able to remotely reprogram the devices… The firmware that shipped with the mobile devices and subsequent updates allowed for the remote installation of applications without the users’ consent and, in some versions of the software, the transmission of fine-grained device location information.

To be fair to ADUPS, they insist that they have cleaned up their act since last month. They say they pushed out a new version of their malware which no longer spies on users.

I don’t know if that is true but it doesn’t matter for owners of the new Nook Android tablet. Linux Journal made it clear that the version of ADUPS they found on the new Nook tablet is an older version which harvests users organs and sells them on the black market which does transmit user data to China.

If you have one of these tablets, I strongly urge you to return it.

Fortunately, B&N has a holidays return policy which states that customers have until 31 January to return most merchandise (including Nook devices)  purchased between 14 November and 31 December.

So if you have that new tablet, and you still have the box and receipt, you can get a full refund.

Barnes & Noble was contacted for comment, but has yet to respond. I will update this post with their statement when it arrives.

eBook Evangelist

Charbax recently caught up with ereader maker Netronix at a trade show and got a first glimpse of their new large-screen ereader. (Later in the video we get to see a new 6.8″ model which is reportedly in mass production. There was no mention of where you can buy one, however.)

Netronix has been showing off a 13.3″ ereader for a couple years now. It’s not even close to reaching the market, but thanks to the long wait the new demo unit is considerably more polished that what I saw at CES 2015.

Weighing in at under 400 grams, the new model is both lighter and thinner, but it still runs Android. It features a 13.3″E-ink display with a screen resolution of 1200 x 1600 and a stylus which utilizes passive digitzer technology.

As you can see in the video, it looks pretty cool, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up that we might one day see it on the market. Someone would have to commit to buy 3,000 units first at a cost of around $1.5 million, and given the small size of the market that just isn’t going to happen.

And that’s a shame because from what I have seen, Netronix has better software than its competition.

There is a similar device with a 13.3″ screen, the Onyx Boox Max, and the only reason that device made it to market is that Onyx is willing to sell it in smaller quantities. (You can buy the Max at eReader-Store.de.)

The Association American of Publishers released their monthly Statshot report, and the ebook news continues to be bad.

Total revenues (for the 1,200 publishers who submit data to the AAP) were down 8% in the first seven months of 2016, to $7.5 billion, while trade revenues were down a fraction of a percent ($3.63 billion).

Focusing on the trade segment, revenues from the adult category were down 3.3%, while YA and religious presses were up 6.3% and 8.3%, respectively.

In terms of formats, audiobook and print revenues were up in that period, but not enough to compensate for the decline in revenues from ebook sales, which were down 19.2%.

Here is the press release:

Childrens and Young Adult titles grew 31.1% in July 2016 vs. July 2016, with the majority of that growth coming from hardback books. While revenue for Trade Books grew in April, May, June and July, the gains were not enough to counter declines from earlier in the year, and the overall category was flat (-0.4%) for the first seven months of 2016 vs. 2015.

Overall publishers’ revenues (sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc.) were down 7.9% for the first seven months of 2016 vs. the same period in 2015. The revenue decline occurred because of lower sales for higher education course materials, and Prek-12 Learning materials.

Overview

• From January to July, sales in all tracked categories were down 7.9% to $7.5 billion vs. the same time in 2015. Tracked categories include: Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses.
  • Publishers’ book sales in July 2016 declined in all categories except Children’s/YA books
• From Jan. to July, trade sales were flat (-0.4%) to $3.63 billion:
  • Adult Books had $2.51 billion in sales, down 3.3%
  • Children’s/YA Books had $877.0 million in sales, up 6.3%
  • Religious Presses had $250.0 million in sales, up by 8.3%

Trends for Trade by Format

• From Jan. – July 2016 vs. 2015:
  • Paperback books grew 8.4%
  • Downloaded audio grew 31.1%
  • Hardback books grew 2.6%
  • eBooks were down 19.2%

Educational Materials and Professional Books

• Educational Materials had a revenue loss of 8.9% for K-12 Instructional Materials and 18.1% for Higher Education Course Materials, in the first half of 2016 vs. 2015.
• Professional Publishing was down 19.4% in the first seven months 2016 vs. the same time in 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 3.9% during Jan. – July 2016 vs. 2015.

image by Radomir Cernoch

Earlier this year I reported that Datalogics was one of two companies which were using Sony’s new DADC ebook DRM. Bluefire was using the DRM in its new cloud library app, and Datalogics was offering the DRM as an option in its whitelabel textbook platform.

Now Datalogics has launched a new app, Bookvia, which uses the DADC DRM.

“We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Bookvia app,” said Ching Yue, Product Manager for eBook technologies at Datalogics. “This year has been dedicated to developing new and innovative solutions for our eBook customers. Being able to offer Bookvia, with the Sony DADC URMS integration, is a significant step forward in providing a complete solution to customers who want to adopt the URMS ecosystem for their eBook distribution channel.”

There isn’t much reason for consumers to download this app; the DRM is not used by any retailer. But according to Datalogics, the benefits include:

• EPUB 3 support for URMS content
• enabling users to consolidate their electronic publications in one app
• Branding options
• a powerful and engaging reading experience
• Night reading mode
• streamlined content delivery to the reader through a common bookshelf
• Highlighting and page scrolling
• In-app Dictionary

The app can be found in iTunes; an Android app is planned for next year.

Datalogics

It has long been possible to buy E-ink screens and kits through electronics supply warehouses or through niche sites like AdaFruit – all that you needed was a credit card and a web browser.

Now E-ink is selling the screens units themselves. E-ink has quietly launched its first direct retail site.  The store has been under development since April(*), but was only discovered this week.

The site is in beta, and it currently carries 20 different screens with sizes ranging from a 1″ circular smartwatch display to a 32″ rectangular signage. Prices range from $99 for that 1″ circular display up to $2,000 for the 32″ sign unit.

While most of the screens are grayscale, E-ink does offer a number of the 3-color Spectra screens in a variety of sizes, including at least one size (5.83″) which I have been unable to find elsewhere.

It’s not clear why E-ink is getting into direct retail; DIY is not a big market (if it were, Amazon would be selling these screens). But one detail suggests that this is less about sales than market research.

E-ink won’t sell you a screen until after you tell it how you want to use it. Customers have to select an option (ereader, wearable, eNote, shelf label, signage,etc) from a drop down. There’s no restriction on how you can use a screen – you could for example use the 1″ round display for an ereader – but E-ink does want to know the intended use.

So apparently E-ink has decided that it needs to know more about how its tech is being used.

That’s a good idea, but wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective to buy mailing lists from retailers and run an email survey?

P.S. Ask me how I know the site has been under development since April. Go on, ask.

P.P.S. The store is running on WordPress, and it uses WooCommerce and the Atkina theme plus common plugins like Contact Form 7.Looking at the code tells us that the first product photos were uploaded in April 2016.

When we look back on 2016 it is going to be remembered as the year of The Donald; the year we lost everyone from Prince to Florence Henderson to Bowie; and in a smaller way 2016 should also be remembered as the year that book industry blogs took a beating.

Several blogs have either shut down, scaled back operations, or radically shifted their focus this calendar year.

While any one of these blogs was a relatively small fry in the grand scheme of things, collectively their demise left a huge hole in the news coverage for the book industry.

The carnage started in February of this year when I announced that I was stepping back from this blog. Advertising was no longer paying what it used to, so I had to find a day job.

I pivoted to become a web developer – I now build author websites, and help people solve problems with their websites.

The next to go was BookSlut, which shut down in May. Founded in 2002 by Jessa Crispin, that site was one of the first book blogs ever, but it was sadly subject to the same financial woes afflicting web publishing today: it couldn’t make any money.

Crispin told Vulture that "when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it" and that

It’s just a really slow process. Running it takes a lot of time, and it makes no money so I’ve been pouring money into it for 14 years. We always were trying to figure out ways to keep it going. I had a meeting with my managing editor and we went through all these ideas and nothing seemed viable and we said, “Oh, we should just close it, shouldn’t we?”

BookSlut was followed a couple months later by Teleread, a site which was literally the oldest ebook blog on the web.

Teleread founder David Rothman had only just bought the site back from Napco in May 2015, but was forced to shift the site to Wordpress.com in June 2016.

While Teleread lives on, it is but a shadow of its former self, with fewer contributors and less frequent postings. As with Bookslut and The Digital  Reader, the root cause was money (I know lots more, but it was shared privately so I cannot repeat it).

The next to go was IndieReader. This seven-year-old site announced (PDF) last Monday that it was essentially shutting down its book review blog in favor of its author services division.

Amy Edelman told me by email that IR would "cease posting reader-centric editorial content and IndieReader Author Services (IRAS), IR’s sister company, will assume IndieReader’s URL", and that

In its new iteration, IR will focus its full attention on helping self-published authors produce books that can compete in today’s more crowded publishing marketplace. Dffering significantly from companies that offer packages emphasizing the “bells and whistles”.

And finally, GalleyCat abruptly shut down on Friday. Editor Dianna Dilworth did not explain why the blog shut down, merely saying that:

We are sad to report that we are closing the book on GalleyCat.

We thank you for your support and readership over the years. Over the past decade, it’s been our mission to keep you informed with news from publishers, authors, booksellers and libraries. We’ve had the pleasure of reading thousands of fantastic books and reviewing many of them along the way.

GalleyCat makes five book industry sites which have closed, scaled back operations, or shifted their focus – all in the space of a calendar year.

Edit: And as a reader reminded me, there’s also SF Signal. That blog shut down in May 2016. (Thanks, David!)

With about two weeks left in the year, what are the chances that 2016 will claim another victim?

image by dreamsjung

Just when you thought that the Association of American Publishers had made its way into the 21st century, it demonstrates that it is firmly entrenched in the 20th.

The AAP released a public letter to President Elect Trump this morning which, as you would expect from a bunch of dinosaurs, called for greater copyright enforcement.

You can read the letter over on the AAP website, but I will avoid reposting any of it because it is the usual nonsense about how publishing won’t survive without MOAR copyright enforcement and how the industry would not survive without copyright (which is why the fashion industry died decades ago – NOT).

It was the usual patronizing drivel which is hardly worth your time to read. This was entirely expected; what I did not expect was to have the entire internet rudely dismissed as inferior to book publishing:

While the Internet and smartphones have added texting, tweeting, emailing, instant messaging, social networking, and blogging to the ways individuals communicate privately with a few or publicly with a crowd, publishing an original work remains a compelling way to tell a story, explain any subject, offer a viewpoint, or spread facts and ideas.

While the AAP may make random grunts about representing web publishers, they are clearly stuck in the past.

We live in an age where we are more likely to find useful instructions online than in a book, where scholarly essays are published digitally first and print second, where thought-provoking essays are discovered and read online, and where news breaks online first before being published in print hours or days later.

The internet has already killed off encyclopedias, niche nonfiction like gardening books, and newspapers.

And yet the AAP doesn’t think any of that matters.

Please climb in the dustbin of history, AAP, and close the lid. You’re done.

image by CJS*64

Over the past few years the King County Library System has operated pop-up free book kiosks at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, but when the librarians were setting up a permanent presence, they decided to go digital.

KCLS announced on Facebook earlier this month that they had installed two OverDrive media kiosks in Sea-Tac Airport:

Are you travelling this holiday season? Be sure to check out the new KCLS eBook kiosks at SeaTac near the A or D concourse. No library card needed!

There’s bright orange signs throughout the airport to let travelers know about the wealth of online materials (books, movies, music) available through kcls.org. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

According to Voice of the Valley, the kiosks will be available until the end of 2017. They are available to everyone, including those who do not have a King County library card. Passengers who have that library card will be able to check out audiobooks and ebooks just like they would from the library’s website, and passengers without a King County library card will also be able to download up to two titles.

It’s not clear whether those two titles will be library ebooks or free works sourced from Librivox or Project Gutenberg, but either is possible.

A library system in Florida, Broward County Library, launched a similar program in 2011 where passengers traveling through the local airport could download free ebooks sourced from Project Gutenberg. That was an idea worth copying, although few library systems have done so.

In any case, the library ebooks checked out from the OverDrive media stations will expire after 7 days, so there will be no need to return them, either.

King County library’s previous efforts at the airport focused on giving away donated books and magazines. Those projects ran during the summers of 2012 and 2013.

KCLS blog